Here's something that happened in a parallel universe, a lifetime ago: I walked the Inca trail to Machu Picchu. (Two weeks ago actually, but normal life is a rude awakening.)

It was hard, and spectacular, and moving. The air was thin, the views dizzying. We saw hummingbirds and iridescent butterflies. In a ruin engulfed by cloud I stood looking over the edge and saw nothing but whiteness for miles below. The Inca must have thought that they lived at the end of the world.

When you walk with people in a place like this you are more open, somehow. Afterwards on the train back to Cusco we found a carriage where musicians had a whole excited crowd on their feet. We clustered around, half of us helpless with laughter, strangers dancing wildly while the mountains rolled by outside.

There will be days, she said. Something in her voice, as though spilling the secret of life. In this fellowship of those who suffer you are warmly welcome. Take this comfort, take this warning. There will be days.

Either this freed me or I was already free. Breathe easy: pain will come. Let it pass over you like labour. What you are birthing is yourself, every last atom made new inside you. You will survive this.

For a while I left the door ajar for whatever would come in. But it seems that we're done with one another for a while, my pain and I. We're taking time apart. I move my fingers and my feet, and they do not feel like mine. I walk for miles, pound the treadmill in praise at the miracle of myself. I stand wrapped in my winter coat to watch lights move across the old city walls and gasp along with the children. Was the world always full of things like this?

I have arrived so late. I wish I had learned faster, lived braver. Maybe it takes even longer, for some, carrying their decades strewn with confusion and loss. Thirty years to see myself and like myself, most days.​​

When we met I wanted to tell him, if you ever leave me, don't do it in the winter. But it turns out I had as little choice in that as in the rest of it. The night came in all at once.​I love something about this haunted time of year. These crow and pumpkin months. The poltergeist winds and fingernail moons. I glove my hands and go into the hedgerow to cut nettles, stem after stem until I have a bag full. A spine breaches through to my fingertip and the pain buzzes there for hours. I boil the leaves in saltwater, bake them into bread.

These days the afternoons rise around my neck like a tide. I drive in the dark and come in the evening to a house which needs kneading through, pressing and rearranging until it feels like home again. I put things away in the kitchen and sweep the floors. I try to make space in rooms where the night is just outside the windows. I am medieval, huddled in an age where fire and home are arrayed to keep devils away.

I am Neolithic. I want to know what they sang to the earth to make it turn again. For my sun I have a light box. A cube the shade of a white-sky day.

This is part two of my series with my friend Jennifer McLean, looking at our writing habits. This week: so many ideas, so little time...

Jennifer McLean: The perennial question for writers is the where-do-your-ideas-come-from one. And (while I’m not saying that I wouldn’t like to find out how some authors made their Faustian deal and get in on the room where it happens) I think it’s the wrong question on a number of fronts. At least at this stage of my life, I have hundreds of ideas. It’s non-stop. I always worried about that, but it turns out that the real problem is knowing what to do with them. We’ll probably talk another time about the issue of deciding which ideas are good ones (answer: certainly not the recurring ones I have about musicals), but our topic for today is what we in our chats have been calling Too Many Projects, Not Enough Time.

​It feels pretty appropriate, this week, for both of us. Certainly, I’ve been in one of those phases where I almost need to leap out of the shower to find a pen because yet another thing occurred to me. Cry me a river, right? It sounds brilliant, but between all the different projects we have on the go, and the necessity of occasionally getting dressed and earning some money, and all the Improving Practices I like to fix upon… Well, without a bit of prioritising, it’s really easy to fall into the trap of helpless, anxious unproductivity.

I don’t think I’m in a position to pronounce on a solution, so I’ll be interested in what you’ve got to say on this. I’m just going to throw in a couple of things I’ve been pondering.

Without a bit of prioritising, it’s really easy to fall into the trap of helpless, anxious unproductivity.

Firstly, I think I like having different projects at different stages. If something’s being planned, and something else written, and another thing being researched, and a further musical being imagined, then I can be productive in a range of ways, which is good for my soul. There’s an extent to which I’ll never be satisfied - that is, that any fresh idea will have the shine of the new, making the current project feel like a slog. Giving myself permission to address some of these ideas by researching, or writing a Edgar Allan Poe rap mashup, means that I’m more likely to finish a few of them. Or take a break, as necessary; I’m prone to doing everything at once and therefore never feeling like I have downtime, when in fact so much time is unproductively wasted. I have to remind myself to wait for it - to let an idea rest, and take the time to address it properly, rather than always looking to what comes next.​

Maybe I’ll come to some of the other points, but what do you think? Should one project be enough, or is there value in the many-pronged approach? How do we avoid burnout? How many of the Hamilton references in the above did you spot, and will we ever be as productive as Lin-Manuel Miranda?

Patience is the name of the game, and being patient sucks.​

S.E Lister: As you know, on an average day I am a jumpy bundle of nerves and manic, unsustainable creativity. I am also at that stage (which, yes, it seems churlish to complain about) of having too many ideas. The biggest challenge in my writing life at the moment is holding these ideas in tension with the amount of time and energy I have to pursue them - which, unfortunately, not very much.

I work three days a week in a job which is quite intense and draining, and by the time I get to the tail end of the week, which is designated as my writing time, my head’s already spinning. Becoming easily overwhelmed can be part and parcel of being a creative type, because you’re always noticing small stimuli and processing things deeply. I’ve learned that it’s important to respect your own limits and not overload yourself, which can be kind of excruciating when you’re in love with six different novels in your head and you want to write them all today. Patience is the name of the game, and being patient sucks.​

The way I get through is to tell myself that projects can wait - and in fact will be better for the waiting. For me, the process which follows the initial idea for a book is effectively years of daydreaming about it while I’m getting on with other things. The longer you do that daydreaming for, the richer the story becomes, so that by the time you sit down to write it you’ve got layers and layers of stuff to draw on from your subconscious.

Currently I have around three different projects living in my head, making demands of me, aside from the thing I’m currently working on. In terms of sticking with things and finishing them, when you’re tempted to jump ship for the new shiny thing, my best advice would be to treat it like a worthwhile relationship: you won’t always feel the romance and sometimes other prospects will look more appealing, but if you commit and put in the work, good things will happen. Does that make sense?

JM: It makes complete sense, and leads neatly to something which we’ve been talking about a lot: that this isn’t an issue confined simply to writing. It’s the essence of privilege to worry about having too many exciting things to cope with, but it goes a little deeper than that, for me - we’ve talked a lot about this, but part of my experience of living with chronic pain (which I’ll probably go into, some time) is that I need distraction to cope. I agree that being overwhelmed is something of an occupational hazard, but for me it’s also necessary to walk that tightrope in order to get anything done. Nonetheless, I do have a massive problem (and again, we’ve talked about this a lot) with becoming deeply, temporarily obsessed with things, and I think that carries over into the writing issue; just as I have several projects on the go, I’ll be waking up with a particular song in my head for weeks, and obsessing over it, then move just as intensely into something else.

All that said, I was talking to a couple of other friends (what? I know!) about The Zone - you know, that thing that happens maybe once in a blue moon, where you’re so focused and everything’s coming out just right, and the minute you notice, it all falls apart. Like suddenly thinking about your tongue. I still haven’t decided what the ideal conditions for that state are. Is having a number of projects on the go preventing that kind of laser focus, or does the deliberate cultivation of productive distractions actually create space for it?

The first rule of productivity for me is consistency - do it, do it again, finish it.

​I haven’t got the answer to that, yet, but I do know that the first rule of productivity for me is consistency - do it, do it again, finish it. I’ve always been very good at dealing with tasks as they arise (inbox zero represent), but that kind of reactive discipline is exactly what leads me astray in terms of rounding things off. You’re definitely at a different stage to me, in that sense, and what you say about committing is very wise. Did you have similar feelings about finishing things? Or did it always come naturally to you? Do you have any hard-won wisdom about focus and commitment?

S.E: In some ways, yes, finishing things does come naturally to me. I really relate to what George Orwell said about writing being a sickness: the closest I can come to a cure is just getting the entire thing out of my system. My vice is impatience, really, the temptation to finish something slapdash and fast rather than slowly and thoroughly. I’m about 2/5ths of the way through the book I’m currently writing, and though I’m enjoying it, the thought that I’m not yet halfway there is terrifying. It feels like there’s a marathon ahead, and summoning the mental tenacity to stick with it feels beyond daunting.

​Magical things happen when you lift away the burden of duty and expectation in writing.

​Conversely, the best way I’ve found to get the job done is not to double-down on the discipline, to make demands of yourself or push yourself to breaking point: it’s to take a breath, relax, and reintroduce the element of play. When I sat down to write Hideous Creatures it had been years since I’d last finished a story of any length, and the constant terror of the distance left to travel seemed to loom over every page. But when I told myself that I was here to play, here to enjoy it, something clicked. I made it fun for myself. I wrote in my favourite cafes and gave myself afternoons off. I told myself that all I had to do was finish this paragraph, this page, this chapter.

​Magical things happen when you lift away the burden of duty and expectation in writing. To bring this full circle and quote our current creative icon Lin-Manuel Miranda, ‘I try not to think of writing as a burden at all. My job is to fall in love.’

I've not posted anything here for ages as I've been busy with work and with novel #3, two activities which between them manage to be pretty all-consuming. But what I have been doing is talking incessantly with my friend Jennifer McLean, who is my sounding-board when it comes both to writing and to life.

Jenny is a poet and short story writer with a Masters degree in creative writing (you can read her blog here), and has also worked as an English and Drama teacher. We often spend time dissecting the fiction we love, as well as our own writing habits and bugbears. In this Writing Talk series we thought we'd share some of those conversations.

This first post is about sharing work: from our experiences of writing as a taught subject, to the reasons why we're still both so cagey about our work in progress.

There’s nothing like the prospect of imminent publication to send me into a fit of soul-searching, and I’ve been thinking a lot, in the last few weeks, about why I do this. I’ve had a tough year – tough enough for me to have questioned whether at this point in my life I can simultaneously earn a living, write books, and remain healthy and sane. There’ve been times when it’s seemed that one of these three things will have to go, and, well, I have to eat.I hope I don’t sound melodramatic or ungrateful: I only mean to be honest. Bringing a book into being is not easy, and sharing it is even harder. What’s so precious to you might be incidental or even ridiculous to other people. Nobody owes you their understanding, much less their adulation. You send it out into the world, this delicate thing, like a kitten into a sawmill. You are not going to please everybody. I expect most learn that lesson far earlier in life, but at 27, this people-pleasing, hyper-achieving straight-A student has only just stumbled onto it. This is the gig. This is what you sign up for, not just when you publish a book, but when you put any thought or action or expression out from within yourself to be received and critiqued by others. So why do I do this? There are easier ways to get an ego trip. There are much easier ways to make a living. I’m currently on a bit of a break from writing, as I’m settling into a new ‘day job’, and in plenty of ways it comes as a relief. I’ve got more time for rest, for seeing friends, for doing the things which – outside of writing – make life meaningful. But obviously, obviously, something is missing.I write because it is the most rewarding job I know of. Because that reward is there long before you hold a physical copy of your book in your hands, before anybody else reads the words you have written. Even, to some degree, before they have been written at all. I do this because these imaginary people, these imaginary places, are where my mind wants to go as soon as I set it free to go there. These people, these places, they are my friends and my home. I do this because I become unhappy and frustrated when I don’t; because it’s my own little patch of land and I want to grow things there. Because it’s what I’m for. Because every book, beneath its layers of metaphor, is a discovery of things I hardly knew I thought and felt and believed. C.S Lewis famously said that we read to know we are not alone. And of course we write to know that we are not alone, too; to tap some stranger shyly on the shoulder and say, I have felt this way. Have you felt this way too?

I wouldn't be writing the kind of stories I write if it weren't for Oliver Sacks. In the time after university when I was struggling to find my voice and to know what kind of stories I wanted to tell, his work opened up a door inside my head.

In the world of Oliver Sacks, lines blur between the scientific and the spiritual, the body and the mind, the metaphor and the reality. It is a world in which the impossible can be described in dispassionate medical terms; in which the mundane functions of our bodies are shown up as wildly miraculous. He understood that wellness and illness are not just physical matters, but existential ones.

Much will be written elsewhere about his enormous intellect, his good humour, his endless curiosity, and his compassion for his patients. I want to thank him for the gift of his wonderful stories; for proving, definitively, that there need be no divorce between the scientist and the artist. Doctor Sacks went in search of healing for the whole self.

'

'We had something of infinite beauty and preciousness - and we lost it; we spend our lives searching for what we have lost; and one day, perhaps, we will suddenly find it, and this will be the miracle, the millennium.'

It's a month to go until publication day. My copies of The Immortals are stacked neatly on my new bookshelf. (My old bookshelf, along with every bit of shelf and spare floor space in my living room, is full of books.) I have completely banned myself from doing any more re-reading, because by this stage it simply doesn't help. What's written is written.

My feelings about my own finished work change faster than the weather. This week I'm kind of ambivalent. The book is probably OK: my publisher said it was OK and I pretty much felt it was OK when I made the final changes a few months ago. Right? But the characters feel distant from me and my emotions are tied up elsewhere - with the new book I'm writing, and with the five or so future books I'm playing with in my head.

This distance is a good thing. If my experience last time is anything to go by, it's what I need in order to get through the shock to the system that comes with your very private fictional world being made public. Like Arthur in Hideous Creatures, I experience stress (and distress) very physically and intensely, and about two weeks before Hideous Creatures came out I felt my lungs close. My chest felt as though someone had closed a fist around it, and I had a very shaky doctor's appointment that went something like this:Me: I can't breathe and I think I'm dying.Doctor: Are you a student? It's probably exam stress.Me: I'm not a student. And it can't be stress, it's definitely physical. And life-threatening. Doctor: Why don't you take a hot bath, light some candles, and come back in a few weeks if you still feel this way?Me: Can't I just have a quick MRI? Or some blood tests? Or you could refer me to-Doctor: It's stress. Bye, Good luck in your exams.

By the time publication day came, I was breathing in little tiny gasps, and felt so ill that I almost called my publisher to say I couldn't come to the launch party. The morning after the launch party, my breathing went completely back to normal. It was stress.

The great writers keep writing about the cold dark place within, the water under a frozen lake or the secluded, camouflaged hole. The light they shine on this hole, this pit, helps us cut away or step around the brush and brambles; then we can dance around the rim of the abyss, holler into it, measure it, throw rocks into it, and still not fall in. It can no longer swallow us up. And we can get on with things.

I can finally share the beautiful cover art for The Immortals, which has been bringing me much secret delight as my phone background since February. We've been on a little bit of a journey with this - if you've seen a proof copy, you'll notice that a few elements got tweaked and then basically returned to how they were originally. I was in love with the original design, so things pretty much panned out as I wanted.

The brilliant artist is James Nunn, who also did Hideous Creatures - you can see more of his work here.

I notice new things every time I look at this cover. It's beautiful and weird and kind of melancholy. To me it brings to mind art deco posters - like the Mucha ones below which I hung above my desk when I first started writing this book, becoming something of a reference point for certain sections of the story.

So now begins the two-month countdown to release day, i.e, the day when I hide my head under a blanket and switch of my phone and slightly wish I'd never written anything.